Starburst Presto Added to Microsoft Azure HDInsight

BOSTON, Sept. 25, 2018 — Starburst, the Presto company, today announced the release of Starburst Presto for Azure HDInsight, and that this new Azure-optimized version of Presto is now available in the Azure Marketplace. Customers can install Presto on Microsoft Azure HDInsight clusters.

Presto is a fast and scalable distributed SQL query engine, originally developed and open sourced by Facebook. Architected for the separation of storage and compute, Presto easily scales to query petabytes of data stored in disparate data sources, including SQL and NoSQL databases, flat files, Hadoop and others. Presto is widely used by digital businesses and Fortune 500 companies as an alternative to traditional data warehousing that is more economical, easier to scale and provides faster time to value.

Adding Starburst Presto to Azure HDInsight enhances it with a fast, scalable, interactive SQL interface. It also enables SQL users to create queries that integrate data in HDInsight with other sources by leveraging Presto’s vast portfolio of data connectors. Starburst Presto also adds fast query performance with other Azure-specific features.

Presto Optimized for Microsoft Azure
Starburst Presto for Azure HDInsight includes a Cost-Based Optimizer (CBO) for the fastest Presto performance — orders of magnitude faster than other Presto distributions, which lowers the cost of running analytical queries. Starburst Presto for Azure HDInsight also features enhanced security and integration with other Azure and HDInsight services including:

Microsoft Azure Blob Storage

Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage

External Hive metastore

Microsoft PowerBI

“We’re working with Microsoft to provide new open source big data solutions to Azure users,” said Justin Borgman, CEO at Starburst Data. “The combination of HDInsight and Presto makes it easy and economical for data scientists and analysts to query data on-demand, wherever it lives and whatever format it’s in, to help unlock exciting new insights months sooner than most data warehouses are able to.”

“Due to its ease of use and ability to integrate data from a variety of sources at query time, Presto from Starburst offers Hadoop users high performance access to their data via SQL,” said ‘JG’ Chirapurath, General Manager, Azure Data & Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft Corp. “We are pleased to have Starburst Presto join the rich ecosystem of big data applications for customers via Azure Marketplace.”

“The addition of Starburst’s Presto to Azure HDInsight is a validation of the growing popularity of the Presto distributed SQL engine,” said Matt Aslett, Research Vice President, Data, AI and Analytics at 451 Research. “Starburst’s distribution is also a natural fit given the company’s efforts on performance optimization and integration with Azure.”

Starburst was founded by leading developers of the open source Presto project. Starburst’s Enterprise distribution of Presto provides analysts with the ability to perform fast, interactive queries on data wherever data lives, including popular sources such as HDFS, S3 and S3-compatible object stores, Azure Blob Storage, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Kafka, and Teradata, among others.